Late last year Facebook announced they are going to convert
all Facebook Ad Manager Accounts to a newer and improved versions ‘BusinessManager’ effective mid-February. Option of converting into a BM account was
there for Facebook advertiser but most people waited till last minute, not
knowing what exactly will be the changes. In developed markets, Facebook
offered support through their sales reps in the conversion process but markets
like Sri Lanka never happens to get such assisted transitions in situations
like this.

Being a part of Ogilvy worldwide network, we had the privilege
of getting Facebook support in the conversion process. We recently completed
100% migration from older version of Facebook Ads Manager platform into the new
and improved Business Manager platform.

If you are a small business owner or an individual
advertiser who doesn’t have access to assisted transition to Business Manager,
this post will help you understand some fundamentals in the new platform.

Better User Access Control

Overall, Facebook’s Business Manager is an advanced (in
terms of access controls and usability) platform than Google Adwords My Client
Center (MCC). If you are already familiar with Google’s MCC for Adwords, you
will find it extremely easy to adapt to Facebook’s Business Manager. Just like
in Adwords MCC, you will be able to manage different ad accounts from a single
login to your Business Manager.

One major drawback in Google’s MCC is access control. You
can control the levels of user rights to the MCC, but you cannot control which
ad account (or accounts) a particular user can access or cannot access. For
example, if you grant “standard access” to a user to a Google MCC, she will be
able to have standard access to all child accounts in that MCC.

Compared to that, Facebook’s Business Manager will let you decide which ad accounts
can be accessed by each of the ‘employees’ added to the BM. (There are two
types of users you can add to a BM. Admins and employees). For example, if I am
managing company A’s and company B’s Facebook ad accounts through my BM, and if
there are dedicated employees for each company, I can restrict the employee
responsible for company A from accessing the FB ad account of company B (and
other way around too). This is an extremely valuable option for larger agencies
who manage dozens of different client accounts.

Add Multiple Payment Methods

In the old ad manager, once you add a payment method that
will apply for all campaigns you run on that ad account. If you are running FB
ads for two different clients in the same ad account, and if your payment
method fails, that will affect both the clients. In the new system you can add separate
payment methods for each ad account you separately create for your clients and
manage the entire billing process independently. This enables agencies to be
more transparent with clients, by letting clients to access their ad accounts
with access control.

One Login, Multiple BM’s

To login to any number of different Business Manager Accounts
you have access to, you need to use only one login ID that is your personal
Facebook ID. Earlier, for each personal Facebook account one ad manager account
was assigned. As a reason, people who are supposed to manage Facebook ads for
their employers used to create a separate Facebook account to manage the FB ads
and maintained their personal Facebook profiles independent from work life.
This was clearly a violation of Facebook’s T&C which says, “no one user
should create more than one Facebook account under any circumstances”. To
worsen things, people use to share these “official FB accounts” with their
bosses, clients, and other colleagues. Facebook now identifies these accounts as
“shared accounts” or “gray accounts” and allow you to add all past data in such
ad managers into your new Business Manager as a ‘shared account’. Once you do
that, Facebook will block access to your ‘gray account’. If you
have two or more business manager accounts, you will still need just your
personal Facebook account to login to it. All you have to do is, going to https://business.facebook.com and
login using your Facebook account. At the next screen, BM will ask which
account you want to login to (if you have access to more than one BM account).

Things You Must Know Before You Convert to Business Manager

First of all you need
to have a fully functional personal Facebook account to create a Business
Manager. You must have admin access to the official fan page of the
company/business you are creating the BM account for. For example, when we
created the BM account for Neo@Ogilvy SL, the person who initiated the process
was supposed to have admin access to Neo@Ogilvy Sri Lanka Facebook page.
Facebook identified this as the primary fan page of the Business Manager
account.

Once you create your Business Manager account, you can
import your old ad manager account data by going to the “Ad Accounts” tab under
‘Settings’ on your Business Manager interface.

You can add ‘employees’ and more ‘admins’ under the ‘People’
tab on the BM interface.

I only started using the Facebook Business Manager
yesterday. I will continue to learn more cool features of this platform as I
use this for practical purposes, and will share some more tips on this blog in
time to come.